Lidl & Aldi, Market Harborough

All is forgiven. Although I will still be collaborating with Gary Wood online, I have said goodbye to Edinburgh and am back here in the Midlands.

And back to the comforting Germanic chic of Lidl and Aldi.

Lovely Lidl with not a queue nor even a cashier in sight.

As is custom, I left Lidl with my armful of goods and dropped them into the passenger foot-well of my car, and then popped over to Aldi to see if there were any more treats to add to my foraging expedition.

I picked up some chocolate ice-cream, biscuits, apples and tomato sauce and then made my way to the tills.

It was a hand on hip type of queue as there was not a cashier here either.

I put my items onto the conveyor belt and, while looking at the positioning of my items, I slowly began to understand what makes going to Lidl and Aldi such a unique shopping experience.

It’s the relaxed nature of it all. The way that it’s not necessary to use a Next Customer Please divider as there’s plenty of space to spread yourself out.

Here in Aldi there is none of the Hellos and Goodbyes or Would you like help with your packing? nonsense that you find in Sainsburys and the like. Good God, there’s not even a free carrier bag. Instead, there’s a real person with a genuine amount of charm that you would expect from someone on a shitty wage.

I had barely taken my receipt from the young male cashier and, without so much as a Goodbye or See Ya, he’d already left his seat and was standing in aisle 2 scratching his inner thigh.

Over these last few years, ‘good’ customer service has become so entrenched in the big supermarkets that the customer too is under pressure to conform. We play along with making eye contact at the beginning of the transaction, smiling and saying Hello, refuse the help with our packing in an amiable way, and then smile once more as we take the receipt, eye contact, small nod and Goodbye.

I remember in the late 90s that ‘corporate’ was a word thrown about to describe the clinical nature of big business, but recently corporate has come across all chummy and it, quite frankly, leaves me feeling a little cold.

The workers at Lidl and Aldi couldn’t give a damn about your well being, and I find this to be a bit of a haven.

Yes, sometimes they smile and are happy, but this is normally for no other reason than because they are in a good mood.

By the way, this is the 100th post for Standinaqueue. I never thought we’d get this far, but here I still am, standing in queues across Britain.

Thank you for reading.